Hardware hack 3D, software still needed

If you’re on the fence about 3D TV and related technologies [Anton B.] might be able to help you decide. No, he’s not going to shove pamphlets in your face and explain why its the wave of the future. Rather, by showing the hack-ability (its a word) of 3D shutter glasses. A simple bridge of wire across specific contacts can ‘trick’ the glasses into only displaying only the left or right picture.

Wouldn’t that make it just a regular 2D TV again? Yes, that’s the beauty of it. Person A could be watching a completely separate movie pr0n than person B, but all on the same TV. Or two people could be playing a video game, without dividing the screen in half. The only problem is the current lack of software that can interlace movies/games, who’s up for writing some C++ this weekend?

Cool idea!!! This would definitely be a neat hack. Not likely I’ll be running custom software interlacing my Xbox360 input with my cable box… but potentially through a set-top computer it’d be feasible.

Neat idea but then everyone would need their own headphones too unless you want to hear crap from your roommate playing Halo while you watch No Country For Old Men. It would be cool to see this using polarized displays and glasses instead of shutter glasses.

@Luke How would you overlay polarized screens without them canceling each other out? e.g. If one places a horizontally polarized screen in front of a vertically polarized screen you will only be able to see the vertically polarized screen even with horizontal glasses.

Unfortunately, the idea has already been patented by Toshiba so it is officially forbidden to have the same idea. Please stop hacking, erase your brain, and write to your MPs about the silliness of the patent system.

neat hack..
now can someone extend this a bit so that it works with a DLP projector, in theory this could be done with any old surplus fast LCD panel, with front polariser removed.

interesting modification would be to adjust the 3-D goggles so that they switch only on one in every three frames, this way three people could use the same screen with a decrease in frame rate..
you would need to adjust the goggles however, by rotating the displays so that the polarisations line up…..

reason: all 3d tvs are required to understand the “side-by-side” format with both views packed into a single full hd frame. you loose half of horizontal resolution, but all you have to do is arrange two media player windows next to each other and switch the tv to side-by-side. presto.

One of the problems with systems like this is figuring out if the left-frame or the right-frame is currently being displayed. (This systems seems to know somehow. I’m not sure how.)

Counting VSYNC signals and having the user select L/R is another way, but it depends on being able to produce every-other frame content exactly.

I couldn’t do that on ancient Cray machines (1990s). so I invented a way to synchronize the LCD shutter glasses using a square of data embedded in the images themselves. Left images have a white square and right images have a black square. Then a photo detector placed at the front of the screen reads the image type and sets the LCD shutter glasses automatically.

It looks like modern glasses are WAY WAY more sophisticated then the SEGA glasses I had to work with. Great improvement.

You can read about it if you like at patent #5,245,319 “Synchronized stereoscopic display system”

No, I didn’t get even $1 for this patent. The company spent all the thousands of dollars to get it patented, so I’ve got no gripe.

so u take a 120hz tv, and split it into 4 individual feeds at 30hz, or do 2 at 60hz so you can play battleship multiplayer without your opponent seeing where your ships are, or play multiplayer shooting games without your opponent knowing where you are at all times, so you can truly sneak up on them/snipe. i’ll wait 6 years for it to become mainstream

@AlanKilian: Interlaced scanning is one way to reliably encode left and right images. With a true interlaced signal this alternates left and right eye views on vsync. If your hardware only supports progressive scan a line blanker can be used to simulate interlaced scan.
Alternatively, you can encode the left and right views one above the other and inject an additional vsync pulse half way down the screen (sync doubling).
Both methods result in a loss of horizontal resolution, as opposed to alternate frame which results in a loss in frame rate.

3d vision compatible players (like the one on nvidia’s site) already come with an option to load a separate left and a separate right video file… audio will only play from one of them
also, what the hell is that guy saying “remove polarizer from normal lcd display” THIS IS FOR ACTIVE SHUTTER LENSES, NOT POLARIZED DISPLAYS, also the polarized displays have a microfilm layer that polarizes every other line differently, the polarizer before and after the lcd matrix is still there…
there are no 600hz monitors out and it would be impossible to make them currently anyway (other than LASER technology, no other technology makes this possible). it would also require a TON of bandwidth, more than something like quad link dvi could provide (and there is no quad link dvi)
shutter glasses make the display atleast 2x darker than it normally was anyway, so this kind of “sharing” isnt very practical for more than 2 people anyway

@willy:
That’s pretty much how shutter glasses work. One 1px black/white LCD over each eye. The glasses alternate which eye is allowed to see, while the screen displays the corresponding left/right images.

Or, as the story goes, you can black out both eyes at once (alternating between two sets of glasses) and displaying player1/player2 images on the screen. Quite ingenious!

Im a tech at a mercedes dealership. One of my jobs is to activate the split view feature on those s-class’s. Its really cool. 2 people can view 2 diffrent things on the same screen at the same exact time. no need for glasses either.